July 2007 - Posts
Lately my posting frecuency has decreased, but it'll never stop ;) The reasons are multiple:
- It's summer, and in Madrid it means hot, hot, hot (we're getting nearly 40 degrees celsius some days!). And what better to combat hot temperatures than a big, cold beer, so I'm getting out with friends a lot (almost daily)
- At ilitia we're having a lot of projects (I'm doing something "new" right now, and we have some other ideas in "call for papers" phase), and as I help with the human resources department (by doing some technical interviews), some days I'm tired of the "developer world" and I prefer to disconnect a bit.
- Videogames! It was almost a month since I last played anything else than World of Warcraft (and less than 30 minutes sessions with that), so now I'm playing some cool games like The Darkness, Overlord, Guitar Hero II and Dungeon Maker.
- I'm reading something less technical, more security oriented (about Microsoft's SDL). But I have lots of e-clinics to finish, and the MCAD to MCDP upgrade exam waiting (apart from others more related to security without a specific schedule).
- And of course, the need for vacations... Apart from visiting Germany for 8 days, I haven't had vacations since november. I'll take another 10 days in mid-august and I really need to spend one or two days doing nothing at home, just relaxing, sleeping and recharging batteries.
But do not fear, because I've got some ideas in mind, like doing more Community Server modules and components (some right now are User Controls but I want to redo them properly), playing a bit with Google Picasa Web API (to make a small tool) and maybe playing a bit with AJAX and JSON to learn them.
As I always say, I just need 36 hour days :)
Getting to work again on computers related stuff, I've done a new book review, which you can read at the Book Reviews section.
Sorry for the delay, but here are the winners from the June 2007 edition of the Kartones.NET MVF Awards:
- Code, Freak and Videotape: Being the uber-freak of game development, what else can be said...
- Dave Dan: ilitia's master of Sharepoint :)
- Kartones Blog: Next edition I won't allow voting me ¬¬
The winners have their logo now displayed on their blog.
In december we will have the voting open again. I hope that it'll get more feedback/votes, you lazy readers/visitors! :P
Today I was building a mock of an ASP.NET Web Service for my current project, and I had some problems reading XML with spanish characters ('ñ' for example).
I tried changing the <globalization> tag of the Web.Config to use an international encoding but it didn't work.
I tried forcing the WS encoding from C# code, but it didn't work either...
After some digging, I found this "fantastic" explanation:
According to comment written by a member of the MS team there is no way to change ASMX encoding.
We decided not to do this feature for 3 reasons:
1. UTF-8 can represent all Unicode characters
2. The Xml spec requires that all Xml processors understand UTF-8
3. We were short for time and there were other interesting features to consider.
Cool, now I have one good excuse for the next time we're in a rush and we have to get something finished "for yesterday" :D
So, If you want to change the XML response encoding from a WS from UTF-8 to another encoding... forget doing it from .NET ;)
Offtopic: I've uploaded the photos from my vacations on Germany at my web albums.
I just came back last week from Germany, but the combination of some work at the office, the summer (and associated beers after work) and that this weekend I didn't have my laptop at home, I've not been able to get in order my photos and write some posts and stuff I've got pending.
The only useful computer-related thing has been that I'm using Ubuntu right now to write this post (from my old laptop). After some initial fighting with the graphics driver (and one reinstall of the OS because I screwed the GUI), I've correctly configured it.
I still had to search internet (official Ubuntu forums mostly) for some help and how-tos, but overall excepting graphics driver everything works quite good. I'll keep using it from time to time,and soon I'll try more interesting things like installing Pidgin and trying to configure the 3D options to try Beryl too.
Oh, and of course I'll upload to my web albums lots of photos from Germany... I've loved it.